“CODOH” – Where everything is.

SMITH’S TALK IN TEHRAN at Iranian Holocaust Conference in 2008

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Great Holocaust Trial Defense Attorney Doug Christie is Ailing

By Michael Hoffman

According to his wife, Keltie writing in her June, 2011 Friends of Freedom newsletter, 65-year-old Canadian Attorney Douglas Christie, the fearless barrister who so ably defended Ernst Zundel in two historic thought crime trials in Toronto in 1985 and 1988, has “prostate cancer of an aggressive grade that has already spread locally outside the prostate.”

Doug is one of the finest men and purest souls it has been my privilege to know. He went far beyond being Ernst’s attorney. He became his friend and a defender of the German people as a whole. In the course of the two trials he had to absorb thousands of facts, hundreds of books and dozens of maps, models and diagrams in order to defend Ernst to the best of his ability. He spent hours in court and then hours at night and on weekends studying with the Zundel defense team, led by Dr. Robert Faurisson of France. A lesser man would have been broken by the stress and the media libel. Doug relished the challenge and stepped into history’s spotlight chasing destiny.

With the brilliant and thorough organization so typical of Mr. Zundel, Doug’s daily after-court briefings in the basement of Zundelhaus were preserved on video. I have included highlights of those briefings in my documentary film, “The Great Holocaust Trial,” (not to be confused with the book of the same name).

After the Zundel trials, Doug continued his career as “the Clarence Darrow of Canada,” although he stands head-and-shoulders above Darrow, who in some respects was an opportunist (Darrow’s finest hour was his defense of Bill Heywood and the IWW in Idaho in 1907; his nadir was the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case).